You Only Look on Lymphocytes Once

Mart van Rijthoven, Zaneta Swiderska-Chadaj, Katja Seeliger, Jeroen van der Laak, Francesco Ciompi

Abstract: Understanding the role of immune cells is at the core of cancer research. In this paper, we boost the potential of the You Only Look Once (YOLO) architecture applied to automatic detection of lymphocytes in gigapixel histopathology whole- slide images (WSI) stained with immunohistochemistry by (1) tailoring the YOLO architecture to lymphocyte detection in WSI; (2) guiding training data sampling by exploiting prior knowledge on hard negative samples; (3) pairing the proposed sampling strategy with the focal loss technique. The combination of the proposed improvements increases the F1-score of YOLO by 3% with a speed-up of 4.3X.

Author Affiliation: Radboud University Medical Centre

Keywords: cancer research, digital pathology, lymphocytes, object detection, YOLO